


what will i do without exile

by raumdeuter



Series: team spirit [6]
Category: Football RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Rivers of London Fusion, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-14
Updated: 2018-02-14
Packaged: 2019-03-14 12:28:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13590060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raumdeuter/pseuds/raumdeuter
Summary: December 2017. Kevin visits Lukas in Kobe.





	what will i do without exile

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tunafish](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tunafish/gifts).



> dear recip, this was thoroughly jossed during the winter break when it turned out that lukas visited kevin in köln because lukas had opened a fucking döner shop, which just goes to show you that truth is stranger than fiction, and i apologize for that

He’d thought a couple beers before his flight would be a good idea. He’s never really liked to fly, and some part of him thought maybe if he slept most of the way he wouldn’t mind it so much. He knew it would be a long flight before he got on the plane but he didn’t know how long, exactly, and then when he saw it’d be eleven hours he thought maybe he’d have a couple more beers on the way.

He’s regretting it now. The airport lighting is bright, clinical, clean--it’d be hell on his eyes even if he weren’t hung over. In the distance a woman is making announcements over the intercom and her voice sounds pleasant enough, but he doesn’t know what she’s saying.

“Welcome to Osaka,” says Lukas. He smiles and he’s bright, too. Too bright.

 

\----

 

Kobe suits Lukas--or maybe it’s the other way around. Or maybe it’s both. Kevin can never tell if Lukas changes to fit the city or if the city changes to fit Lukas, whose broken Japanese endears him to Kobe the same way his broken Turkish had endeared him to Istanbul. People greet him with a kind of familiarity, as if he were a friend and not a foreign celebrity, and he returns the sentiment without a second thought. Fitting in for Lukas is as easy as slipping on a new jersey.

Once or twice during the drive out from the airport Lukas catches Kevin staring, but to Kevin’s relief he doesn’t say anything: only smiles, a closed-mouth quirk upwards that brings the pale scar on his lip into sharp relief. Somehow it only makes Kevin stare more.

 

\---

 

“Do you want çay?” says Lukas, rummaging through his cupboards.

“What?” says Kevin. Lukas’s flat is new, but it’s already starting to feel like his in a way Kevin can’t define. Even in Turkey Lukas’s apartment had felt lived-in, even though he knows Lukas hadn’t been there for much longer than he had.

“Çay,” says Lukas, emerging with a teapot. You need a special teapot for çay which Kevin can never remember the name of. It looks like two normal teapots stacked on top of each other. Lukas must have brought it with him from Istanbul. “You look like you need it. Rough flight?”

“I didn’t know they had it here,” says Kevin.

“They have pretty much everything here. I found a supermarket.” Lukas is already filling the bottom half of the teapot with water. “It’s a good blend.”

“Shouldn’t you be drinking, you know, green tea,” says Kevin. “Isn’t that how they do it here.”

Lukas shrugs easily. “Don’t see why I can’t drink both.”

“Oh,” says Kevin. “Yeah. I guess.”

His mouth tastes like sour beer and his teeth feel fuzzy. His head aches. He doesn’t want any kind of tea. He wants a glass of water. He wants to ask Lukas how he can carry so many cities in his heart and not mind the weight of them, only he doesn’t know how to find the words.

Instead he says, “Where’s your bathroom?”

 

\---

 

It doesn’t hurt, exactly.

Most days it just feels like he’s a cell phone that hasn’t been charged in too long, like there used to be a cord plugged into his heart leading all the way back to the Ruhr, winding through forests and across seas, and now it’s gone. And sometimes he thinks if he stays in one place too long, if this waiting and waiting never comes to an end, one day he’ll just--power down, or something. Just slow to a halt and lean over and stop moving entirely.

It doesn’t stop him from going to matches these days but that doesn’t make the hollow feeling go away, either. Mostly the matches just remind him of how it felt before. How the Yellow Wall would sing for him--well, not for _him_ , usually, but they’d sing, and he’d feel so full of light he thought he might burst, and there wasn’t anything he could do but pass it on, channel it to everyone around him until the whole pitch was bursting with the crackle and spark of it.

He knows now that’s not how it’s supposed to work. Philipp and Thomas took him aside and explained it all, before, well--before they played Brazil. He’s not going to forget how weird it had been, sitting there in a hotel room with two of the most Bavarian people he’s ever known, listening to them tell him what it meant to be Dortmund.

He hadn’t understood. Not really. But back then he’d thought he’d have more time to figure it out.

 

\---

 

When he comes out of the bathroom there are two cups of çay on the table and Lukas is rinsing out the teapot. Kevin sits down, more out of something to do than anything else, and the çay smells so good he thinks maybe he will have some after all.

He can’t say it tastes just like it did back in Istanbul, because truth be told he never really drank much çay in Istanbul. He’s never really been a tea kind of person.

“So,” he says, and curls his fingers awkwardly around the cup, not quite touching it. “Vissel Kobe, huh? Ninth in the league right now?”

“Yeah,” says Lukas.

“Yeah,” repeats Kevin, and looks down at his tea.

He’d googled the standings while he was in the bathroom, but all the actual articles he found were in Japanese or English and now he’s out of things to say. He’s too tired right now to feel anything like regret but he can feel it building up inside him anyway, like nausea.

He drinks some more çay, and when he sets the cup back down Lukas is sliding into the chair opposite him. For a little while it’s just the two of them, sitting there, drinking their tea. Lukas savors it like he savors everything else: smells it, his eyes drifting closed, before taking a sip. Then he opens his eyes.

“Hey, man,” he says, “why did you come here?”

Kevin’s expecting the question but that’s not the same thing as knowing what he’s going to say in response. Instinct kicks in before he has a chance to think it through, and suddenly, behind the jetlag and the turbulence and everything, he’s angry.

Like Lukas doesn’t know. Like _Kevin_ doesn’t know.

He thrusts his chin out a little, like half a challenge. He doesn’t want to pick a fight but some part of him, the really tired part, thinks maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if he did. Maybe it would be good for him, after everything.

He says, “Why did _you?_ ”

 

\---

 

(You don’t stop being a club when you leave it, Philipp said. Not always. You just feel it more.

Some days Kevin wishes he’d never found out, even if it meant one fewer trophy etched in ink on his back. He thinks maybe he’d feel it less, if he didn’t know.)

 

\---

 

“Huh,” says Lukas. “So you know.”

Of course Kevin knows. He’s known who Lukas is for years, because it’s either him or the goat, and even though it _could_ technically be the goat Kevin’s gut has always told him otherwise. Because Lukas can wear as many different jerseys as he wants, but there’s only one coat of arms on the inside of his bicep and it isn’t London’s, or Istanbul’s, or Kobe’s.

Kevin doesn’t say _So what are you still doing here when Köln are bottom of the league,_ because there’s no good way of saying it that won’t come out all wrong. He thinks maybe Lukas will understand him anyway, even if it does come out all wrong, but he doesn’t want to risk this--thing they’ve had between them since Istanbul, this weird tenuous understanding that might snap at any moment, like a power cord stretched too tight.

Some of it has to show in his expression, because Lukas sighs and scrubs a hand across his face, like he doesn’t know where to start, and says, “Okay, is that why you came? To convince me to come back?”

“No,” says Kevin. Then: “Yeah. Maybe. I don’t know.”

Lukas looks unimpressed. “You flew halfway around the world for this. Don’t bullshit me, man. I thought we were better friends than that.”

He has a point. But now that Kevin’s actually here, half a world away from Germany, it feels stupid to say it out loud.

He tries anyway. “Our coaches,” he says. “Köln’s coach, I mean. When we--when _Dortmund_ took Stöger on, like a trade, or whatever--” Lukas is looking at him now like he’s got two heads, but he’s never known how to stop. “I thought we had to, you know, do something. Like we did in Brazil. Something to seal the deal and shit. That’s why I came here.”

It must take Lukas a moment to put all the pieces together, because his brow furrows for an instant before his gaze goes suddenly clear with shock.

“You thought we had to fuck,” he says. “Because you hired our coach.”

“We don’t, do we,” says Kevin. He can feel the last remnants of anger draining out of him now, along with what feels like everything else, until he doesn’t even really have it in him to feel embarrassed. At least Lukas doesn’t look like he’s going to laugh at him--that’d be the one thing he wouldn’t be able to bear, after everything. “That’s not a thing people like us have to do.”

Lukas almost looks like he’s going to agree. But then he pauses.

“I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe.”

“Maybe,” says Kevin.

“The thing about all of this,” says Lukas, gesturing in a wide arc that seems to encompass the world but still seems--kind of intimate, for all that, “is that nobody ever explains it to us. Not really. Not even the Bayern guys have it figured out, even if they like to think they do. Maybe once there were rules for this shit, but that was in the past, you know? Now we kind of have to make it up as we go along.”

“Oh,” says Kevin, because he’s still stuck back at the part where Lukas didn’t flat out say _no_.

Maybe Lukas sees. He sets his cup down and pushes his chair back, and he moves slow and careful, so that when he walks around the table and leans down and kisses Kevin, Kevin has time to pull away.

Kevin doesn’t pull away.

“It matters,” says Lukas. His breath is hot against Kevin’s cheek. “That’s how all of this works. If you think it matters--it matters.”

 

\---

 

He thinks maybe it should feel like magic.

There was magic on the pitch that night in Rio, he knows, but this doesn’t feel anything like that. That had been planned. This is different--this is hurried, urgent, like even though Kevin knows he’s here in Kobe for another week it feels like he has less time than that.

Maybe that’s the magic of it. Maybe that’s Lukas’s worry bleeding through, the threat of relegation warping the air around them and turning it hot and stifling as he thrusts desperately against Kevin, their cocks sliding together, the friction of it just short of enough. Or maybe they’re just really fucking horny. It’s hard to tell.

Lukas kisses him and it’s badly timed, they come in at the wrong angles and their teeth click together hard enough to send a buzz through Kevin’s skull, but that feels right: he reaches out, fingers sliding through Lukas’s short hair, pulls him closer just as Lukas bites at his lower lip. There’s magic in that, too, the bright burst of pain, the taste of his own blood in his mouth, salt-subtle. Or it isn’t magic at all, and he’s only hoping--

Then Lukas gets a finger in him and Kevin decides it doesn’t fucking matter if it’s magic after all. Not when they both need this, _them_ , the flesh and blood that isn’t bound to anything else, that was Lukas and Kevin before their clubs sank into their bones and settled there for good.

Part of him wants to tell Lukas that; the rest of him doesn’t know how, and in the end he settles for marking up any part of Lukas he can reach, his blunt fingernails leaving half-moons across Lukas’s shoulders, his arms, the four stars standing out dark across his chest. Lukas has two fingers in him now, working him slowly open, and Kevin wants like he hasn’t wanted a thing in what seems like years, only it’s been too fucking long since--this, since Istanbul, since Rio--

He’s still caught halfway between want and need when Lukas lowers his mouth to Kevin’s cock, and the slick heat of it is too much, all at once. He comes before he can think to warn Lukas, but Lukas only makes an encouraging noise, lets him ride it out, shuddering, before he pulls his fingers away.

“Well,” says Lukas into the breathless silence. “You think it’s working?”

There’s a streak of come on his upper lip, the twin of the scar beside it, and it takes a moment for Kevin to drag his gaze away.

“Yeah,” he says, quieter than he means to. “Yeah, I think it is.”

**Author's Note:**

> -poldi, as we all know, doesn't actually have a four star tattoo on his chest, but in this universe he got it instead of a bad tattoo of his kid's face  
> -at some point while writing this i learned that kevin has a fucking tattoo of the dortmund skyline on his leg because of course he does, but i couldn't find a way to fit it in that wasn't even more hamfisted than the rest of this fic so like. just keep that in mind  
> -lov u imk :*
> 
> haha lord now i guess i can officially add this to the team spirit series


End file.
